The NanoPc T3 is a 64 bit octa core single board computer, quite similar to the famous Raspberry Pi boards. It is also often referred to as NanoPi T3 as well.

Hardware Specification

The single board computer has eight cores with up to 1.4GhZ and 1 GB of DDR3 RAM. It has a lot of nice interfaces, the specification below is taken from [here][1].

SoC: Samsung S5P6818 Octa-Core Cortex-A53, 400M Hz - 1.4G Hz
    Power Management Unit: AXP228 PMU, it supports software power-off and wake-up.
    System Memory: 1GB/2GB 32bit DDR3 RAM
    Storage: 1 x SD Card Socket
    Ethernet: Gbit Ethernet(RTL8211E)
    WiFi: 802.11b/g/n
    Bluetooth: 4.0 dual mode
    Antenna: Porcelain Antenna IPX Interface
    eMMC: 8GB
    Video Input: DVP Camera/MIPI-CSI (two camera interfaces)
    Video Output: HDMI Type-A / LVDS / Parallel RGB-LCD / MIPI-DSI (four video output interfaces)
    Audio: 3.5 mm audio jack / via HDMI
    Microphone: onboard Microphone
    USB Host: 4 x USB 2.0 Host, two type A ports and two 2.54 mm pitch pin-headers
    MicroUSB: 1 x MicroUSB 2.0 Client, Type A
    LCD Interface: 0.5mm pitch 45 pin FPC seat, full color RGB 8-8-8
    HDMI: 1.4A Type A, 1080P
    DVP Camera: 0.5mm pitch 24 pin FPC seat
    GPIO: 2.54 mm pitch 30 pin-header
    Serial Debug Port: 2.54mm pitch 4-pin-header
    User Key: K1 (power), Reset
    LED: 1 x power LED and 2 x GPIO LED
    Other Resources: CPU’s internal TMU
    RTC Battery: RTC Battery Seat
    Heat Sink: 1 x Heat Sink with mounting holes
    Power: DC 5V/2A
    PCB: Six Layer
    Dimension: 100 mm x 60 mm
    OS/Software: uboot, Android and Debian

Overview

The device offers quite a lot considering its small measurements. The picture below is an overview picture taken from [here][2].

[][3]The device with the heat sink and attached cables is shown below.

[][4]

Comparison with the Raspberry Pi Model 3B

It costs about twice as much as the Raspberry Pi 3, but comes with eight cores at 1.4GHz instead of four cores with 1.2GHz, GBit Ethernet instead of just 100 MBit and several additional interfaces. It has a dedicated power switch, supports soft poweroff and provides reset and boot buttons. It comes with an SD card slot instead of micro SD, has only two standard USB ports but also one micro USB port. This port however is not for powering the device, but only for data.

Some remarks at First

The board can get quite warm, so I would recommend buying the heat sins that fit directly on the board as well. The wifi signal is also rather weak, I would recommend investing in the external antenna if the device is in an area with low signal reception. Also it requires an external 5V power source and does not provide a micro USB port for power like similar boards use.

Buying and Additional Information

The board can be obtained for 60$ from [here][5] and there also exists a [wiki page][1] dedicated to the T3. The images are stored at a One-Click share hoster and the download is very slow. Also the files are not that well organized and can be easily confused with other platforms offered by the same company.

Nano PC T3 ($60)
Heat sink ($1.99)
Power supply ($20)
SD card (~ $10)

Additionally there is shipping ($20 to Europe) and also very likely some toll to pay.

Initial Setup

The NanoPi T3 has an internal eMMC storage with 8GB capacity. It comes pre-installed with Android, which is not really useful for my applications. Instead, there exist different ISO images wich can be obtained here. The wiki page documents how to create bootable SD cards with Windows and Linux and there are also scripts offered, which automate the process. Unfortunately, the scripts are not documented well and some of the links are already broken, which reduces the usability of the provided information. Also as the images should be downloaded from some Sharehoster, there is no way of verifying, what kind of image you actually obtained. This is a security risk and not applicable in many scenarios. Fortunately, there also exist alternative images which are more transparent to use.

By default, the device boots from the eMMC flash storage. By pressing the boot button in the lower right corner, we can also boot from the SD card. This is a nice feature, but if you want to reboot the system unattended, then we need to replace the default operating system. In the course of this article, we are going to write an alternative Debian image to the flash memory and boot this OS automatically.

DietPi

[DietPi][6] is a Debian based distribution, which claims to be an optimized and lightweight alternative for single board PCs. The number of supported devices is impressive and luckily, also the NanoPC T3 is in the list. It also comes with a list of nice features for the configuration and the backup of the system. DietPi can be dowloaded [here][7] and the documentation is available [here][8].

The following steps are requried:

Download the DietPi Image
Write the image to the SD card
Mount the SD card on your desktop and copy the DietPi image to the card
Boot the NanoPC T3 from the card
Flash the DietPi image to the eMMC
Reboot
Configure

Creating a Bootable SD Card

The fist step involves creating a bootable SD card by writing the DietPi image with dd to the card. To do so, download the DietPi image to your local Desktop and then write the file with dd. The process does not differ from other single board machines and is described [here][9]. The next step might seem a bit odd. After you finished writing the SD card, mount it on your local Dekstop and copy the DietPi image to the tmp directory of the SD card.The reason we do this is that we need to have a running Linux system so that we can flash the integrated eMMC of the T3. We then use the DietPi Linux zu actually flash the eMMC of the T3 also with the DietPi image. By copying the image we save some time for downloading and we have the image right available in the next step.

Boot the SD Card

Make sure the T3 is powered off and insert the SD card into the board. Hold and keep pressed the boot button and flip the power switch. The T3 then should boot into the DietPi system. It is easier if you attach a monitor and a keyboard to the system for the further configuration. Alternatively, you can also configure the networking settings in advance, by mounting the SD card at the Desktop and edit the configuration files there, but as we simply use this system for installing the actual operating system, this might be a bit too much effort. Press CRTL+ALT+F2 to switch to a new TTY and login. The standard login for the DietPi system is with the user root and password dietpi.

First, create a backup of the original eMMC content, just in case anything does wrong. Use fdisk, to see the available drives.